Abstract

In this paper, we propose a corpus annotation scheme and lexicon for Chinese kinship terms. We modify existing traditional Chinese kinship schemes into a comprehensive semantic field framework that covers kinship semantic categories in contemporary Chinese. The scheme is inspired by the Lancaster USAS (UCREL Semantic Analysis System) taxonomy, which contains categories for English kinship terms. We show how our scheme works with a Chinese kinship semantic lexicon which covers parents, siblings, marital relations, off-spring and same-sex partnerships. The kinship lexicon was created through a pilot study involving the Lancaster University Mandarin Corpus. We foresee that our annotation scheme and lexicon will provide a framework and resource for the kinship annotation of Chinese corpora and corpus-based kinship studies.